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{{newreview
|author=John Feinstein
|title=Moment of Glory: The Year Tiger Lost His Swing and Underdogs Ruled the Majors
|rating=4
|genre=Sport
|summary=Despite the picture of Tiger Woods on the dust jacket this book is only incidentally about him. Between 2000 and 2002 Woods had dominated top-class golf, winning six of the twelve majors. But he's always after improvement and he sacked his swing coach and turned to someone new. The swing is the engine of a golfer's game and tinkering with a good swing has major implications. For Woods it meant that he floundered out of the big money in 2003. For everyone else it meant that there were chances to be taken. You might have expected that it would be the established stars who took advantage, but it wasn't to be.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847442455</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|summary=Najat El-Hachmi's debut novel, The Last Patriarch is a difficult book - both in terms of content and style. It's a story of physical and sexual abuse in a patriarchal Moroccan family, an immigrant story, when first the father and then the family move to Catalonia, and ultimately a story of the narrator, the patriarch's daughter, breaking free of her past as she takes on different cultural values. Narrated entirely from the perspective of the patriarch, Mimoun Driouch's unnamed daughter, the story is also concerned with cultural and imagined histories, and the importance of origin stories.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1846687179</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Joanna Kavenna
|title=The Birth of Love
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=The Birth of Love has four interwoven storylines about characters in different times, past, present and future. The common theme is birth.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>057124517X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Louis Sachar
|title=The Cardturner
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=
''How are we supposed to be partners? He can’t see the cards and I don’t know the rules!''
 
17-year-old Alton Richards is shoehorned into becoming the driver and cardturner for his blind, octogenarian, bridge-playing, but above all rich, uncle by his grasping parents - who are up to their eyeballs in debt and have a weather eye on potential legacies. Alton sighs but goes along with it. He's used to being told to call Lester Trapp his favourite uncle and he's used to his unrepentently mercenary parents.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408808501</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Sarah Blake
|title=The Postmistress
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=The reader is in no doubt that a war is raging. 'And bombs were falling on Coventry, London and Kent. Sleek metal pellets shaped like the blunt tipped ends of pencils ...' The Americans however, are carrying on with their daily lives regardless. They are completely unfazed and uninvolved. Apart from one or two, namely radio reporter Frankie. She reports from London as it happens and she is gradually becoming more and more concerned that her fellow Americans will be called upon. But she seems to be a lone voice blowing in the wind. Also, as you may expect, there are plenty of raised eyebrows as to why a woman is doing a man's job. She should be at the kitchen sink or having babies, shouldn't she?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918687</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Ian Ogilvy and Chris Mould
|title=The Train Set of Terror: A Measle Stubbs Adventure
|rating=4
|genre=Confident Readers
|summary=You will feel sympathy for Measle from the very start of this book. Not only is he an orphan, and stuck friendless in a horridly dingy house on the wrong side of the train tracks, but he shares his life with its main torment - his guardian, Basil Tramplebone. Basil makes no effort to improve Measle or his lot - he does not educate him, keeps Measle and his inheritance a great distance apart, and feeds him slop. Measle would even like to have a bath now and again - but not in the putrid brown and green gunk coming from the taps. The only thing that redeems Basil at all is that he owns the world's best train set, one Measle would love to get to know a lot better. Unfortunately for Measle, he's about to get that wish granted...
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0192729705</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Tess Callahan
|title=April and Oliver
|rating=4.5
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=After spending their childhoods together, April and Oliver haven't seen each other for many years. It is only after the death of April's little brother that they find their lives overlapping again. April is reckless, damaged, and struggling from one day to the next whereas Oliver is mature and sensible. He is now a law student, engaged to the sweet, gentle Bernadette who is the antithesis of April. Seeing April's life in tatters, Oliver tries to rescue her from herself, yet the more entangled he becomes the more his own seemingly perfect life starts to fall apart.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099537524</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Pauline Rowson
|title=The Suffocating Sea: A DI Horton Marine Mystery Crime Novel
|rating=3.5
|genre=Crime
|summary=Anyone who loves murder mystery novels will know there is a big difference between a policeman and a copper, and Pauline Rowson’s character DI Andy Horton in The Suffocating Sea is every bit a copper. Tough on the outside, soft on the inside Horton is just the chap to start nosing around a suspicious fire on board a boat – at least that’s where it starts, because DI Horton is about to discover he is more involved in the mystery than just as an investigating officer.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0955098246</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Tishani Doshi
|title=The Pleasure Seekers
|rating=4
|genre=Literary Fiction
|summary=Essentially this is a love story between two people - Babo from Madras and Sian from small-town Wales. You could argue that two more disparate cultures would be hard to imagine. Factor in that the novel opens in the heady, free love days of the 1960s and a very entertaining story starts to unfold.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0747590923</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Bonnie Hearn Hill
|title=Star Crossed: Taurus Eyes
|rating=4
|genre=Teens
|summary=Logan McRae is excited by the prospect of attending a writers' camp hosted by author Henry Jaffa, who starts off by asking them all to write a project idea and then shuffles them around. Instead of her longed-for astrology feature, Logan ends up having to write about folk singer Sean Baylor, whose ghost may be haunting the
locality. The only person who doesn't have to switch is the cute boy at the camp, Jeremy, who Jaffa allows to keep his original topic – of Sean Baylor. So, Logan and Jeremy end up fighting over research material while also clearly wanting to get to know each other better – does the ghost exist? Will they get it together? Who will write the best article and get it published? The answers to all these questions
and more lie inside the second book in the Star Crossed series (along with some temporary tattoos!)
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0762436719</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=F G Cottam
|title=The Waiting Room
|rating=4
|genre=General Fiction
|summary=On the outskirts of ex rock star Martin Stride's country estate lies the disused Shale Point Station. Abandoned in the 1960s the railway line has been dug up and removed and all that remains is the crumbling platform and eerie waiting room. Martin is quick to employ Britain's top ghost hunter Julian Creed to investigate the strange and threatening occurrences of the waiting room that he and his children have witnessed – the sound and smell of a steam train, male voices singing a famous World War One song, and most frightening of all, the leering face of a soldier at the waiting room window.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1444704214</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Robert McCrum
|title=Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=We British tend to forget just how insignificant we are.
 
Tiny geographically. Tiny in population. Tiny, whatever we tell ourselves, on the world stage.
 
Yet our language is spoken in various forms worldwide by approximately four billion people; about a third of the world's population. How did ''that'' happen? This is what Robert McCrum attempts to explain.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670916404</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Alison Murray
|title=Apple Pie ABC
|rating=4.5
|genre=For Sharing
|summary=Take one traditional rhyme (''A was an apple pie, B bit it...''), mix it up a bit with new words, add a pinch of sweet girl and a dash of naughty dog, and you've got a recipe for... well, a unbelievably cliched first line in a review from me, but also a super book.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1408308010</amazonuk>
}}

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